Kentucky and Indiana

I think it's safe to assume that this had something to do with Abraham Lincoln.

Hand-Turkeys

Now, what else did you think I'd post today? It's a grand old American tradition. I wonder what children in turkeyless countries turn their hand-tracings into?

This is the drawing that's bleeding through from the reverse (or possibly obverse...I'm not sure which side was originally the front) side of the above piece. I don't know why the vulture perched on the sign has two different-colored wings.

STOP IT!

This, to me, is perhaps the oddest thing I've posted here. The collaged mascot characters are from the cover of a sketchbook, but I can't remember which manufacturer's mascot he is...Speedball and Grumbacher are the two most likely suspects, but I can't find evidence of the source off hand. I have no idea what they're arguing about, either.

The Skyway Inn

I thought this might have been the name of an actual motel we stayed at when I was small (Gatlinburg, 1972 was the likely setting in my mind), but I can find no evidence to support this. It's possible that this is floating in the sky, Jetsons-style, but I may have just neglected to draw other hills and mountains to ground it in its setting. The apparent face formed by the balconies and window at the right may or may not be intentional. Frankly, I can't make head or tail of this, but here it is anyway.

Seussian Band

My inspiration for this musical menage isn't hard to trace... to a point. It's obviously Dr. Seuss, but which book? A hastily-assembled brain-trust spanning the continental United States has failed to produce an answer to that question, and my books are inaccessible at the moment. The first comment with the correct answer will win a major award !

Criminal Escape!

I suppose this is a (possibly unfinished) drawing of a prison guard tower, but I'm open to other theories. If so, it might have been inspired by my reading of "The Super-Stalag of Space", a Legion of Super-Heroes story from Adventure Comics #344 & 345 (May/June 1966), that I read when it was reprinted in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #202 (June 1974).

Saruman!

Well, my father wrote that this was Saruman, so I suppose that it must be. It's been about 30 years since I read any of Tolkien's work, and close to that long since the ill-fated film, so I frankly can't remember who he is, though hasty research reveals that you folks out there in Computerland think he looks like Christopher Lee, and there is in fact no scriptural basis for my skull-faced rendering. Nevertheless, I stand by my unique artistic vision.

The Earl of Sandwich

Look, Ma-- no hands!

More Fun with Drafting Implements

What better use of a fancy protractor thing than to make a drawing of said protractor thing?

Wanted, Dead or Alive

Possibly the Batman villain, but I can't guarantee that. While I'm in the realm of conjecture here, I believe that it's possible that all the random marks may be intended to represent bullet holes.

Gremlin

I once had a tiny (maybe 2" tall) figure of a gremlin... one of those oily rubber jiggler figures that they stopped making in the early '70s. He seemed to be based on the AMC Gremlin's mascot (or, at least, I made that association in my mind), and he was a pearlescent yellow color. While the feet are kind of small, I think that this is a drawing of that toy.

Return of the Space Cowboy

Here is the other version of this drawing that I mentioned last week. I wonder if they're perhaps copies of an image I saw somewhere, since the drawings are so similar. (though, in coloring, I seem to have turned the lasso into a balloon...which changes the mood a bit).

Some People Might Call This a "Space Cowboy"

Few, if any, would call it a "Gangster of Love", however.

A Day That Shall Live in Infamy

A brief treatise on the "General Sherman" tree, the biggest living thing in all the world. Mostly notable because, according to my mother's note on the back, it was my first homework assignment. Also, I suspect, my last one to be turned in on time.

Ten Toes and Three Mouths

The second drawing featuring someone with snakes for arms here at "Early Works", though I wouldn't consider it a running theme in my work or anything. I don't know if those are lightning bolts or merely jagged antennae on his roll of neck-fat (which might actually be a loose-fitting necklace). This piece was a little tricky to reproduce, being drawn with what I imagine to have been a fairly hard (6H?) red colored pencil on green school paper, so this is as clear as I could get it.

I got a perfect score on my quiz on the obverse face, though I was apparently too eager to get down to important monster business to take the time to sign it. Mrs. Ashworth seems to have been able to figure out who was responsible easily enough, though.

Something Concerning Bats

I'm pretty much at a loss to explain what's going on here, unless it's a cutaway view of a vending machine that dispenses live bats. Which actually seems like it would be a pretty cool idea, except for the potential liability issues. I put a "Batman" label on it, but I'm not convinced that he has anything to do with it.

Running the Gamut of Emotions

Those of you who are under thirty won't remember it, but in the pre-internet days, when having conversations, we had to express emotion by means of hand-drawn "emoticons such as the above. At appropriate times, one would hold up the piece of paper and point to the face that best represented one's emotional state. A few years later, a new approach came into vogue, whereby conversations would take place near mainframe computer terminals, and, when emotional disambiguation seemed necessary, people would hand over to the technicians previously-composed stacks of IBM punchcards, which when fed into the card reader in the proper sequence would eventually produce a crude image of the chosen cartoon face rendered in numbers, letters, and asterisks on large sheets of tractor-feed paper. This was a slow and cumbersome process, so most folks just kept to themselves. One reason that Star Trek's "Mr. Spock" was such a popular role model among college students in those days was that emulating his cold, emotionless speech patterns eliminated the need for these prehistoric "emoticons".

Evel Knievel, Part 2

Today we present a sequel to the entry of March 14th, from a deeper stratum within the same jumbled box. These are probably from the same week, if not the same day.


Here we see another view of Evel's Snake River Canyon jump on 9/8/74. Again, it's not particularly accurate in depicting the Sky Cycle, but I did correctly portray his failure to make it across.


I don't know what he's jumping over here, but I think that it's a shark tank (does that look like a fishtail coming out of the water to you?). He did attempt (and fail) to jump over a shark tank in the winter of '76, but I don't think these drawings are from that late.

Optically-Illusory Frog

This seems to have been referenced from a book I had exhibiting this classic optical illusion as a drawing of three frogs, each of whose mouths was one of the designs, except that I apparently just thought it looked cool and drew one of the frogs, embellishing it a bit.

The Justice League

...or at least a subgroup thereof. Not drawn to scale, obviously. Don't know where Superman left his cape.